Research findings suggest that methods used to improve teaching are as important as the goals. Solutions sought should be those that professionalize the practice of teaching and make education sufficiently attractive to recruit and retain talented people as teachers. (MLF)

Researchers used simultaneous feedback, a means of modifying behavior through verbal cues transmitted via a transistorized ear plug, to improve the teaching skills of university faculty engaged in the act of teaching. Faculty identified areas they wished to improve after viewing videotapes of their teaching. (Authors/PP)

Writing instruction must provide structured experiences that expose students to every step in the composition process and use insights gained from current research. Teachers must themselves become writers, and concentrate on encouraging fluency rather than grammatical correctness. Strategies for training teachers are suggested, and those used in…

Based on research done in the past decade, the authors formulated a "schema" of teachers' judgments, planning and interactive decisions. Recommendations for future research included development of a taxonomy of critical teaching decisions, intervention, and alteration of teachers' plans and decisions to improve teaching, and implementation of…

Contends that writing projects, especially the National Writing Project, exemplify a promising orientation toward learning and knowing. Explains the essence of successful writing projects--teacher centered activities, mutual support among teachers, and teachers' writing. (RL)

An analysis of more than 200 studies that investigated the effectiveness of various kinds of teacher training methods. (Author/MLF)

Provides a brief overview of the history of faculty development efforts at community colleges and a summary of the research. States that successful faculty development programs must have administrative support, be formalized, have structure, be goal-directed, have faculty ownership, and be valued by administrators. (Contains 21 references.)…

In this article, we consider the efficacy of criticality in cultural context for transformative teacher education. We present data about how a small purposive sample of educators who participated in a culturally based university course found the experience to be pivotal in their personal and professional development. For this article we ask: (a)…

In this article, a number of scientific schools of thought and research results are reviewed and found to show the importance of identifying the existential attributions of teachers. Important points of anchor are existential phenomenology and symbolic interactionism, the approach to organizations as emotional arenas, social-psychological…

This paper presents a transformational philosophy of educational leadership, with a focus on the practice of supervision. The paper defines and outlines the purposes of both leadership and supervision. It discusses multilevel social forces that affect leadership for K-8 schools and examines four dimensions of leadership--knowing oneself, the…

Many colleges and universities are trying to improve both the quality of their education school's curriculum and the caliber of the students they enroll. In the last five years, 85 percent of the schools have taken some action in this direction. Some examples are: (1) the University of South Carolina has eliminated undergraduate degrees in…

An investigation was made of current uses of formative and summative teacher evaluation. A review of the literature on teacher evaluation systems revealed that most systems attempted to accomplish two potentially conflicting purposes: to encourage teacher development and improve instructional quality (formative), and to judge teacher effectiveness…

This paper provides an overview of instructional evaluation in higher education with a special emphasis upon student evaluation of teaching. The paper includes an examination of the context for evaluation, components of evaluation, and research on student evaluation of instruction, and it proposes a series of recommendations for the implementation…

The Innovation Configurations approach is a way of measuring what aspects of a staff development training program are actually being put into practice. Unlike other methods of measuring implementation (and particularly those used in the evaluation of bilingual program implementation), it does not focus on outcomes but instead answers the…

This report reviews the national educational reform movement of the 1980's, with particular attention directed to seven states: California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, South Carolina, Texas, and Washington. The first chapter provides background information on the educational reform movement. The second chapter focuses on the reform activities…